A king twice
named in Isaiah's prophecies as anointed, and predestined to achieve
great conquests over kings and fortified places; who, when his power was
established, set the Jews free from the Babylonian captivity (Isa. xliv.
28; xlv. 1-14). Ezra relates how the prophecy was fulfilled.
Cyrus, whom he calls "king of Persia," in the very first year
of his reign issued a proclamation permitting the Jews to return to
their own land, and urging rather than simply allowing them to rebuild
the Temple, for the use of which he returned the sacred vessels taken by
Nebuchadnezzar (Ezra i. 1-11; v. 13, 14; vi. 3). Many of the Jews
gladly availed themselves of the permission, and returned to
Jerusalem. Enemies attempted, with some success, to render the
edict of Cyrus abortive, but it was never formerly revoked (iv.
1-5). Herodotus, Xenophon, and Ctesias were none of them
contemporaries of the great king, or sufficiently near his age to be
able to disentangle the real incidents of his life from the myths with
which they had become closely intertwined. According to Herodotus
and Xenophon he was the son of Cambyses,
the Prince of Persia, and Mandane, the daughter of Astyages, king of
Media. His infancy and early youth, of course, were
romantic. Arrived at manhood, he in 560 B.C. defeated and captured
his father-in-law, reigning in his room. In B.C. 546 he conquered
Lydia, taking Sardis or Sardes, its capital, and making a prisoner of
its king, Croesus, celebrated for his enormous riches. In B.C. 538
he captured Babylon. According to Herodotos (i. 190, 191), he did
this by turning the waters of the Euphrates temporarily into a lake
excavated for the purpose, and then entering from the nearly dry bed of
the river by the gates which had been left open on the night of a
festival while the inhabitants were engaged in revelry. There is a
curious duality about the classical accounts given of Cyrus. For
instance, he died in two different ways and at two different places
remote from each other. By one account he was killed in battle,
apparently in Tartary, by Tomyris, king of the Massagetae; by the other
he died peacefully in his bed, and was buried at Pasargadae, in Persia,
where his sepulchre is still shown. Hence the late Mr. Bosanquet
was convinced that two Cyruses had been confounded together, one the
father and one the son of Cambyses. Now, however, a new source of
information has arisen—cuneiform inscriptions, one of them from Cyrus
himself, who calls himself at first "king of Elam," though
after a time he conquered Persia. The other tablets tell of the
conquest of Ekbatana, the Median capital, by Cyrus, the soldiers of
Istuvegu (Astyages), its king, coming over to the young Elamite
monarch. When Cyrus planned the capture of Babylon he entered
Babylonia from the north, but found his way barred by an army led by
Belshazzar, the king's son, who prevented him from even approaching the
city. Thus foiled of his purpose for the time, he intrigued with
the disaffected elements of the population, and revolts occurred.
Then in June, 539, Cyrus defeated the Babylonian army, led by the king
Nabonidos, the father of Belshazzar, at Rutuin. On the 14th of the
month, Gobryas, Cyrus's general, arriving at Babylon from the
south-east, was admitted into the city without fighting. On the
3rd of October Cyrus entered it in triumph. Herodotus's narrative
about the turning off the Euphrates is all a myth. If there was
any truth in the tale, it should have been placed in the reign of Darius
Hystaspes, and not in that of Cyrus. "As for the sons of
Babylon," the conqueror says in his tablet, "all their ruins I
repaired, and I delivered their prisoners." These prisoners
probably meant the Jews. Most of the Persian kings were of the
Zoroastrian faith, but the inscriptions unexpectedly reveal that Cyrus
was, or at least from policy pretended to be, a devout worshipper of
Bel, Nebo, Merodach, and the rest of the Babylonian gods. He died
in B.C. 529, and was succeeded by his son Cambyses. (The Sunday
School Teacher's Bible Manual, Hunter, 1894)